Comment Forgetting Has Its Benefits (Score 1) 684
"We focus so much on memory that forgetting has been maligned," says Gayatri Devi, a neuro-psychiatrist and memory expert in New York City. "But if you didn't forget, you'd recall all kinds of extraneous information from your life that would drown you in a sea of inefficiency."
Memories of mundane, recurring events compete to be recalled, and scientists say the brain appears to be programmed to forget those that aren't important. Neuroimaging studies show that it's the brain's prefrontal cortex, the area of complex thought and executive planning, that sorts and retrieves such "like-kind" memories. Researchers at Stanford University's Memory Laboratory demonstrated last year that the more subjects forgot competing memories, the less work their cortexes had to do to recall a specific one. In short, forgetting frees up brain power for other tasks, says psychologist Anthony Wagner, the lab's director.
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